1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and image forming method and, more particularly, to an image forming technique in an image forming apparatus which performs super-resolution processing.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is known a super-resolution processing technique of performing data interpolation processing for a plurality of low-resolution image data having different phases to generate high-resolution image data (see, e.g., Ricoh Technical Report No. 24, November 1998).
There is also known a system which reads low-resolution image data whose phase is changed by adding an offset value to a scanner, and generates high-resolution image data by a super-resolution processing technique (see, e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 8-98009).
However, the super-resolution processing requires a plurality of low-resolution image data. To execute this processing, an image forming apparatus having a memory capacity large enough to hold these low-resolution image data needs to be used.
The memory capacity may be reduced by decreasing the number of low-resolution image data used in super-resolution processing. In this case, high-resolution image data generated by super-resolution processing may not satisfy a desired image quality depending on low-resolution image data to be reduced.